Leila Dawney is an Associate Professor in Human Geography. A social theorist and cultural geographer, she is renowned internationally for her conceptual and empirical work on authority, affect and experience. She has led several projects investigating modes of experience in late capitalist life, generating conceptually driven empirical research on commons and postcapitalist spaces, nuclear decommissioning and community, personal debt, and on cultures of militarism in in the UK. She currently holds a Leverhulme Fellowship to develop her current research on temporality, nuclear decommissioning and the afterlives of modernity, which involves fieldwork in a former nuclear town in Lithuania. She has received invitations to speak in Italy, Sweden, Netherlands, Brazil, Ireland, Lithuania and the USA. Three of her publications have been translated to Brazilian Portuguese, where she is known for her work on ruination and community authority.
Project statement:
Temporalities after Progress: on endurance and living on
As we acknowledge the limits of industrial progress and growth-based capital, places produced through the dreams of modernity are increasingly seen as “left behind”. The aim of the fellowship will be to challenge this temporal definition by investigating how the aftermath of failed or obsolete infrastructure is lived and experienced. I will develop a new conceptual framework for understanding temporalities after progress in an illustrated monograph based on ethnographic research and creative collaboration in the former Soviet atomic city of Visaginas, Lithuania entitled After Utopia.
Website:https://experts.exeter.ac.uk/32900-leila-dawney
